"Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses."

It makes sense to me that the trials and tribulations of marriage (which are bound to happen) should be spread out over many years as opposed to slapping you in the face from the beginning. I think that every couple should get to have a few years of bliss before the rocky roads. Then experience some challenges that bring you closer and stronger as a couple. These challenges shouldn't be too difficult, but shouldn't be too easy either. We all know that humans are not perfect so we cannot expect marriage to be. It is hard to live with someone else. It is hard to merge your lifestyles. It's difficult to become new parents, experience sickness, death of loved ones, job changes, homebuying, and other life issues. These issues are going to happen. There's no way to avoid them. Some people may argue that they'd rather just get all of the problems out in the beginning, learn from them, and move on. I, on the other hand, think that more marriages would survive if not too many problems happened at once.

Joey and I just celebrated our two year anniversary. We got married on March 19, 2011 and the last two years have been extremely difficult on our marriage. We were together for 3 years before we got married and had lived together for two of those years so we were not strangers to living together. We got married when I was 5 months pregnant. We did plan to get pregnant with Brynlee and it was not important to us that we weren't married when we got pregnant, but it was important to us (me) to get married before she was born. During our first year of marriage, we were not only newlyweds, but new parents. Up all day and night feeding a hungry baby, sleepless nights, lack of homecooked meals, new financial responsibilities of a baby, and a house that never seemed clean enough. It was hard for me to return to work when she was 6 weeks old. I've never wanted to be a stay at home Mom, but I wish maternity leave in the US allowed Moms to stay home with their babies a little longer. I would have loved to stay home longer, but we need my paycheck each month. It made me very sad to leave her with someone else. I think one of the hardest jobs a working Mom has is trusting someone else to take care of her baby while she goes to work. It's exhausting to be up all night with a baby, take her to daycare to go to work, then come home to cook, clean, and take care of the baby. I was exhausted by the time I got to bed every night. Lots of fights and petty arguments happened. It was a hard adjustment and luckily, we had an easy baby.

During our second year of marriage, Joey got sick. He started to get sick in February. He had 4 hospital stays, two major surgeries, and a colostomy bag for 14 weeks. It was rough. He missed a lot of work and used all of his sick and personal days before the end of March. Each of his hospital visits were at least 4 days. He had to have a PICC line put in. A PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter) was inserted into his right arm and connected to a large vein near his heart. He had heavy duty outpatient antibiotics every morning for 9 days. It's even a pain to take care of. We had to wrap his arm up every night so that he could shower. Water could not get into the PICC line or it was considered an emergency and he would have to go to the ER and have it fixed. Having water enter the PICC line is very dangerous and life threatening. So we had to be very careful. His first surgery was on May 17th. Here is my post about that. The surgeon was hoping to avoid a colostomy bag, but wouldn't know until he got in there. They removed 8-10 inches of his colon. When the surgeon came out to talk to us after his surgery, he said that this was the worst case of Diverticulitis that he has ever seen.  He said that Joey would have the colostomy bag for 4-6 weeks and then they would go back in and put him together. 14 weeks later and he still had the bag. He couldn't go swimming. We couldn't go to any Ranger's games or go camping. He couldn't do much of anything because he always had to go back home to change/clean the bag. If we went to dinner, he would have to go home right after to take care of his bag. One time, we had to leave dinner in the middle because his bag filled up. You see, those things are hard to empty and clean. It's a lot of work. There's no way I would want my husband having to do that in a public restroom. It was often annoying and frustrating to have to leave whatever we were doing to go home, but I know that we had to. In August, he was scheduled for a colonoscopy to see how his colon was healing in order to schedule surgery number two. Here is my post about his follow up colonoscopy. His second surgery was August 23rd. We were told that it would be about a 2 hour surgery. It turned into a 5 hour surgery. I was at the hospital from 12pm-10pm. It was a long, stressful day. I briefly posted about it here. So the health issues turned into financial struggles, emotional difficulties, and a whole world of other problems. Joey was not able to hold Brynlee and this really upset him. When he did return to work, he had to be put on a light load. Luckily, he now has a clean bill of health. As long as he avoids nuts and popcorn, he shouldn't have any future issues.

Also during our second year of marriage, we wanted to buy a house. We finally got caught up and slightly ahead from the financial struggles of him missing so much work in 2012. In October, we started the home buying process. You see, I never thought we'd be able to buy a house due to Joey's credit score. He had some issues (young, dumb, and in love with his ex) where they made some bad decisions that made his credit score jump off a cliff. I worked really hard to help get his credit up to where we needed it. We were finally pre-approved through our lender. We found a nice house that we both liked and were happy with.  A few days before the grace period (to back out of the house with no questions asked), we were told that the loan program we were pre-approved for had expired. We now had to get his score up an additional 13 points in order to qualify for different loan program. Oh my gosh. It is HARD to get a score up 13 points and get it up FAST. Our lender used the Rapid Rescoring software to tell us what we needed to do to get his credit score up higher. We everything she told us and it involved spending money that we didn't need to spend. We kept waiting to hear back and finally...bad news. His score was still 2 points too low. There was nothing else that we could do to get his score up higher. So we had to just accept that we were not granted the loan and back out of the house. We also lost the money that we had put up for the house. Luckily, it wasn't a TON of money, but it was money that we could have held on to. So not only did we deal with all of his health issues, but now we had the stress of buying a house...without ending up with the house. Before our home deal ended, we had started discussing possibly moving out of Wichita Falls. I think we both took it as a sign that maybe we're meant to be somewhere else. We really discussed it and decided to move to Dallas/Fort Worth in 2013.

Now, during our 3rd year of marriage, we have already faced a few life changing issues. We both quit our jobs in March and moved to Fort Worth. My brother and sister-in-law were nice enough to offer us a place to stay while we get established with jobs and work on buying a house here. I left my job in Wichita Falls on March 8th. We packed up our house and moved here on March 15th. Joey got a job right away in the same field that he was in in Wichita Falls. I, on the other hand, am still looking. As I mentioned in a previous post, I interviewed for a job that I REALLY want and am waiting for a second interview. The 2nd round was supposed to take place last week, but the Area Director and Regional Director are still working on scheduling them. I was told that I will definitely have a second interview so I have been praying that I get called this week. So here we are: living in someone else's house, only one of us has a job, and we don't have the income that we had in Wichita Falls since I haven't started working yet. Sigh. I can only hope that things will get better from here.

Today was our first day attending the new marriage series at church. It's called From This Day Forward. It is about five commitments to a fail proof marriage. Neither Joey and I are "church people". I haven't attended church since my Dad died in 2001. I have a lot of mixed feelings about religion that I won't go into here. Joey just doesn't "do" religion. I don't think he really has any beliefs at all. Anyway, I think that it is important for us to attend this marriage series together. Even if he decides to not attend church after these 5 weeks, that is fine. I am just happy that he is (sort of) open to attending the series with me. I just think that we need help at this point. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for guidance (hello, I am in the counseling field), but I know that Joey will not attend marriage counseling. I would love to go see a Marriage and Family Therapist, but I have discussed this with him and he won't do it. I think it is wrong to force him to do something and that's not healthy for a marriage either.

We've already been through a lot together and I know that there will be more to come. We plan to buy a house here and have a second child. I know that one day we will lose Joey's grandparents and our own parents. It will be hard. We will need to stick together and be there for one another. I know that we will have children who go to college (hopefully) and that will be expensive since tuition increases every year. I know that we will have to stay connected as a couple so that we still have each other when our children grow up and move on to their own lives. "More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse." -Doug Larson

It's sad and very disheartening to me that less than half of married couples stay married. I want to be in the 45% of couples that actually stay married. Marriage takes work. It's not easy. It's going to be hard, but it's going to be worth it.

 "Let all that you do be done in love..." -1 Corinthians 16:14